2020 seems to be the year of conspiracy theories. Now, let’s talk about why tritones don’t exist and why the Bb minor triad contains the meaning of the entire universe.
On May 16th, 2018, at around 11:00 PM, I saved a note on my computer titled, “no tritone theory.” I’d theorized that tritones don’t exist, and my reasoning came from the mediants of C.
In music theory, the word mediant has two definitions. Number one: it’s the third note in a major or minor scale. Number two: the word “mediant” also refers to “diatonic mediant,” in both major and minor scales. The diatonic mediants of the scale are the notes with letter names distanced exactly two letter names away from the root of the scale.
For example, in the scale of C major, C is the root. Moving forward alphabetically by two letters, we reach E. Going backwards from C doing the same thing, we reach A. Therefore, A and E are the two diatonic mediants of C. It’s okay if you don’t know what a mediant is; all you need to know is where the diatonic mediants fall in the scale.
Let’s stick with C major. The diatonic mediants are A and E. The next element of my note was an exploitation of how notes can be named. The same note can have five names, or more, if you add or subtract accidentals from it. Accidentals make it sharp or flat. Starting from C, we can add a sharp to make C#, the next note on the piano keyboard, and add another sharp to make Cx [C double sharp,] which is known to most people as D, two keys away from C. We can do the same thing with flats. Tack a flat onto C and we get Cb, otherwise known as B, and adding another flat gives us Cbb, which is just Bb. I’ll apply the same process for A and E.
Now we’re seeing exactly what I wrote on that note. At the bottom of the note, I made the bold claim that all C mediant chords encompass all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
Let me illustrate. I’ll put this <G Ab [A] Bb Cb,> what I’ll now refer to as the “A strand,” here. Now I’ll place the “C strand” <Bb Cb C Db D> to the right. Notice that they seem to overlap. I’ll meld them together. <G Ab [A] {Bb Cb} [C] Db D> Now I’ll connect the final piece of the puzzle, the “E strand.” <[D] Eb E F F#> The “C strand” and the “E strand” only share one note: D. But the “A” and “C” strands share two notes: Bb and Cb. That makes more sense when you look back at the original note. Bb and Cb appear in both the “A” and “C” strands, but not at all in the “E strand,” yet D appears in both the “C” and “E” strand. The “A” and “C” strands are strongly bonded, and the “E” strand is weakly bonded. This can act as a demonstration which explains why these are the same chord:
*I play the diad A and C, followed by the triad of A, C, and E, or A minor.*
E happens to be the fifth of A. The fifth is the least important note of the chord and can be completely omitted without changing the tonality of the chord. The C matters because that makes the chord minor as opposed to major (that’s the tonality.) And the A matters because this shows that the chord is an A chord as opposed to being any other possible chord. This demonstration is solid proof of that concept.
We see that A minor is a pretty important chord so far. Now, let’s look at this note another way: vertically. Let’s build chords out of these strands going top to bottom. We create G minor, Ab minor, A minor, Bb minor, and B minor, all minor chords. Of course, all of these chords can be built from the chromatic scale like any chord can, but just for a moment, I wanna cross out the notes in brackets. This will make more sense in a second. Now let’s try to build those five chords again that we just saw. Hmm… you can’t build G minor because there’s no Bb; you can’t build Ab minor because there’s no Cb. We can still build A minor. We can’t build Bb minor because there’s no Bb, and we can’t build B minor because there’s no B or D. The only one of these chords that we can build from these remaining notes is A minor, where all of this began.
So far, we have seen that A minor is important because of the strength of its root and third, and also because it is the only chord that remains when you try to build these five vertical chords.
There’s one more element to the importance of A minor here, which can be shown if we connect the two ends of this string of notes. We see that starting from Eb, going all the way up to A, the root of A minor, every single note is chromatic; there’s no break. We don’t break from this until we skip directly to C, the third of A minor which makes it a minor chord. Then we skip back to Eb, which starts the cycle over again. The Eb would make this into an A diminished chord. Diminished chords are built from notes that are exactly three keys apart on the piano keyboard. We skip forward from A three keys to get to C, three keys to get to Eb, and three more to get to Gb, and three keys more takes us back to A. It all centers on A. Notice even with this demonstration, there was no E, just A and C. And technically speaking, diminished chords are still a type of minor chord, so we’re still working with A minor.
We can repeat all these processes starting from any minor triad; it doesn’t have to be A minor. If we replace the letter names with the scale degrees, 1 representing the root, 3 representing the third, and 5 representing the fifth, this is what we get.
There’s one more interesting tidbit about tritones that I wanna discuss. Let’s talk about key signatures for a second. Key signatures tell you what notes to play in a song. If you play those notes, you’ll be in that key. All key signatures start from A minor, which is blank, and that’s the same as C major. When you add a flat, you get F major; or, when you add a sharp, you get G major. So Bb first appears in the key of F major. However, the enharmonic name for Bb is A#, which first appears in the key of B major. F and B are a tritone apart. The first time you see F# is in the key of G major, and enharmonically, F# is also called Gb, which first appears in the key of Db major. G and Db are also a tritone apart. These keys are a tritone apart, but they’re all enharmonically related by tritones.
All the properties of this theory, the “no tritone theory,” can be applied to any note and follow the same principles. I call this the “no tritone theory” because a major or minor triad doesn’t have any tritones, and since all the letter names of the chromatic scale, including the tritones, can be used to build a triad, when we play with the accidentals a bit, I have proof that tritones do not exist.
Well— not in the way we define them, which is as notes that clash and only work in certain contexts. I’ve shown here that tritones actually hold the entire chromatic scale together as a sort of glue, so they shouldn’t be seen as undesirable. I guess I’m aiming for a reinterpretation of how we think of tritones. They do not exist as quote on quote “tritones,” with that negative connotation, but rather as connective tissue holding all of music together, kind of like how the gravitational pull from planetary orbits keeps our planets in their galaxy, preventing them from hurdling across space.
SPACE. THE UNIVERSE. THE MYSTERY OF OUR BEING.
Can we ever find any definitive answers for life? Our existence? Time?
Well, NASA got us halfway there when they discovered all the way back in 2002 that black holes make sound. Sound waves are emitted from black holes when they are first formed and resonate for hundreds of thousands of lightyears. The ones discussed in this article from NASA come from a black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster. This sound is the lowest-pitched sound that scientists have yet to hear from our universe, and it’s been droning on for roughly 2.5 billion years— billion with a B. It just so happens to be Bb— well, not a Bb that we can hear as humans. It’s 57 octaves below Middle C, way way below what humans can hear. Scientists found that these soundwaves help to explain the creation and growth of galaxy clusters. It helps them understand why there’s so much hot gas in galaxy clusters that, contrary to logic, has not cooled down from X-rays carrying away heat energy, which leads to the formation of stars and a black hole. As the black hole swallows things that come into its orbit, jets of pressurized material push gasses out and away from the center of the black hole, forming cavities. The sound waves resonating from these cavities may be keeping the gasses within a galaxy cluster hot. As recently as 2015, it’s been proven that the collision of two black holes creates a ringing sound, along with gradual overtones, just like the overtones that come from any note played on any instrument back on Earth.
So, apparently, Bb is the bass note of the universe, and in connection to this discussion about how minor triads and tritones bring the chromatic scale in perfect harmony, I’ll make the imaginative inference that the sound of the universe is Bb minor. That is the chord resonating throughout our universe. It holds the answer to how our galaxy formed, and therefore life as we know it.
Why is it minor? Because outer space is lonely, and according to almost everybody, minor chords are dark and sad. But, minor chords don’t have to be sad. They can be whatever you want them to be. I just went over how tritones don’t deserve such a negative connotation, and minor chords don’t have to be negative either.
The universe is always getting bigger, but if it’s such a lonely place and the Earth is so small, doesn’t that mean we’re getting smaller and lonelier? No. The universe doesn’t have to be seen as a dark, lonely expanse of nothingness. There’s so much out there to discover that it’s unfathomable. Sadness makes us feel small, but it can also empower us, strengthen us. Scientists haven’t given up on outer space just because of its almost impossible scale, so humans don’t have to give up on progress just because of loneliness, depression, and despair. We learn from this darkness, and discover things about ourselves that make us stronger people.
And that’s a powerful thing.
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